Branwen Smith-King has been honoured as “one of the most influential women in Tufts Athletics history” after being inducted into the university’s Hall of Fame on Friday night.

Smith-King, who represented Bermuda at the Pan American and Commonwealth Games, and won a gold medal in the shot put at the first Carifta Games in Barbados in 1972, spent 35 years at Tufts and championed female athletes as a coach and administrator.

Her legacy at the university includes the introduction of a number of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice initiatives, but she says that the athletes she coached and the students she helped deserve the recognition as much as her.

“I loved working with the students and just as much as I helped them, they helped me,” said Smith-King, who is now secretary general at the Bermuda Olympic Association.

“In my acceptance speech, I had so many things I wanted to say to them, to thank them and share the honour with them. I don’t feel like I was on this journey by myself, and the recognition is for them. The pride that I have is more in the students and how their lives turned out than for me.”

Hired as the women’s athletics and cross-country coach in 1982, Smith-King quickly established the Tufts programme on a national level, with her student-athletes going on to win 13 national championships and earn more than 50 All-American honours. That is a far cry from when she strolled on to campus at a time when women were only just starting to be allowed to compete in NCAA events.

“There was no NCAA for women’s sport at the time,” Smith-King said. “It was just male sports and I was the first full-time coach that they hired because at that time they wanted to bring the women’s programme on to a par with men.

“The men’s programme was very good and I coached both teams for a year and the men’s team were so far ahead of the women I decided I needed to concentrate on building the women’s programme.

“I felt it was an opportunity to bring recognition to women athletes and it was a joy to see these women come in as freshmen. It was really fun to work with young people and impact their lives through sport.”

Smith-King retired from full-time coaching in 2000 and worked as an administrator, with the university paying tribute to the DEIJ policies she enacted before she returned to Bermuda in 2017.

“Even though I was one of only a few people of colour in my department — there were only two other Black coaches when I stared — Tufts had open arms to everyone,” Smith-King said.

“I finished coaching in 2000 and the internet wasn’t a big thing then, so people couldn’t go online and see that I was a Black woman.

“Often when I was recruiting, I would call a kid and they would come up with their parents. They would come to my office and I could just see it in their faces, ‘Oh, it’s a Black woman’ — it was very subtle.

“I wasn’t looking at the colour of skin of their daughter; I just wanted to know how fast she could run, but it wasn’t the same for them. However, sport brings an opportunity to grow.

“If I had an athlete with a racial issue or an LGBTQ issue, my job at Tufts was to make them feel safe, make them feel welcomed and help them to reach their full potential. For me as a Black woman, I was very much conscious of it and it came as second nature.”

The ceremony offered Smith-King the chance to catch up with former students and coaches, but the legacy of her empathetic nature was still evident in her interactions at the event.

“It was glorious and a tribute to the student-athletes I had the privilege of coaching,” she said.

“I’m proud to be a Jumbo and the opportunity they gave a twentysomething Black girl from Bermuda was amazing.

“There were very few women coaches at the time, so I made it up as I went — how to balance my life as a parent, a partner and as a coach, and a story I must tell happened at the ceremony.

“One of my student-athletes who I was close with, I saw her for the first time in a long time. We hugged and she told me that she’d just had a mastectomy and got divorced. She showed me her scars and the fact that she shared that with me in 30 seconds, it was like I was coaching her 20 years ago.

“She is not the only one that has done something like that, and these are the things in life that matter. So yes, there is pride, but it’s pride for them and what they have overcome and accomplished in their life, and what they are still doing.”